10 August, 2007

When I was a toddler, a plucky Croatian/Irish American progressive named Dennis Kucinich, at the time only 31 years old, ran for and won the mayorship of a steel town that bordered my hometown to the West; the same steel town where I was born in 1975 at Rainbow Babies and Children.

The Dennis Kucinich Mayoral tenure is considered Cleveland, Ohio's most turbulent. The Cleveland Free Times recently ran a cover story about a mob assassination attempt against the young mayor, who was fighting an uphill battle against the entrenched corruption and graft that had permeated Northeastern Ohio politics in the 1970s (an era in which my father and mother witnessed first hand a mob car bombing at the steps of Cleveland City Hall, drawing obvious parallels to the 1920s).

In 1979, family friend and former colleague of my father George Voinovich, a Cleveland lawyer, ran against Kuchinich and won the mayoral race. He oversaw a brief period of economic growth for a city that has been behind the 8 ball for as long as I have been alive. Voinovich, now a United States Senator for Ohio, is a man of integrity and honor, and a believer in the most lofty and laudable aims of the Barry Goldwater breed of small government Republicans, and I respect him very much for that in this age of intellectually dishonest partisanship.

But Voinovich's values, laudable as they are, are not enough to reorient our nation from the reckless course it has taken with George Walker Bush and Richard Cheney at the helm, abetted by a party of demagogues and radicals. And, this year, George Voinovich doesn't happen to be running (what that Republicans would abandon draft movements for Newt Gingrich or Fred Thomspon in lieu of a real conservative; nevermind the repulsive irony of the term "draft"). Dennis "The Menace" Kucinich, the Kid From Cleveland, is running for president.

And after this last presidential debate its hard for me to justify not giving him my vote. And how could you not, with this sort of plucky confidence and charm?

SEN. DENNIS KUCINICH: I’m kind of the Seabiscuit of this campaign. And when I come from behind to win this race, people are going to say, “No way we're going to run against this guy.” And so -- and another reason they’re going to say it is because my first month in office: cancel NAFTA and the WTO; trade based on workers’ rights, human rights and environmental quality principles; a not-for-profit healthcare system; saving Social Security; making sure we have universal pre-kindergarten. Let me tell you, when I push through that agenda and establish a workers’ White House, they are going to be there to say, “No competition in 2012. We're ready for Kucinich for seven years, eight years. Let's keep going. Make it happen.”